REFLECTION MEMO Submitted by: Kuldeep Singh (18338)

Followings are few points of deliberation struck to me as an out of our guest speaker session on “tension
between purpose and profit in school education”. The thoughts are related to the education sector and
complexity, ambiguity and uncertainty in social interventions.

School Education:

Ideological standing for school education: Inefficiency of government to deliver good quality education
raised hope for privatisation as a solution. Although quality and cost aspect have pros and cons which
demands ideological standing to deliver school education.

Impact of privatisation: Privatisation allows parents to select higher quality education while it increases
the cost of education for poor ultimately putting the burden on girls due to patriarchy. The impact is worse
for urban marginalised poor as they stuck in middle.

Ambiguity on the purpose of education: Skill development and labour creation have been considered as
one of the purposes of education from an economic perspective. On the other hand, universal humankind
values like equality, companion etc. are not considered a purpose. Importance and complexity of education
as a public good has developed its issues.

Structure of the Indian Education system: Sequential & parallel education stream has created lack of
entry or exit options for student. Systemic structural issue of education makes social Intervention difficult.

Public/State service as a benchmark: Unique to education as a public good, the quality of education by
state serves as a benchmark, and private providers are marginally better with higher cost. Such nature of
education as a public good brings higher responsibility on the state to improve quality.

Right to choose vs Equality: RTE and education for all demands state to deliver education to everyone.
While the right to choose brings privatisation into delivery leading to increase in cost for the poor.

Individuality vs group, competition vs collaboration: Bi-polar aspects of education like memorisation vs

thinking etc. is a reason for leaders not coming on consensus. Both aspect of the bipolar end are equally
essential for education. Similarly, the content of history shapes the ideology and perception of the future
generation. How to deliver education on so many dimensions in 1 year itself poses hurdles.

Social Intervention in general:

The blurred boundary of state vs private Intervention: It is debated for all public good delivery that when
to allow private and at what level/position in value chain privatisation will benefit the society. Health,
sanitation (synergy), education (TFI issue of payment), transport etc. are debated on privatisation.

Role of the incentive-based program: For e.g. Bihar govt. program of giving 2000 INR coupon did not
work correctly. The complexity and multi-dimension interactions of life and public goods, many times
leads to failure or negative impact of monetary programs.

Impact assessment indicators and data: Impact assessment is difficult in social interventions as
quantitative methods are not developed enough. Data collection and underlying basis or assumption of
indicators often lead to misleading insights. In the session, we saw issues with NSSO and UDISE data and
how data collection methodology can create biases.

The tension of service delivery to deserving vs accessible: Limitation of resource with state or private
party and ability of the public to access services raise a fundamental question of where to intervene and for
whom. Education, health etc. should be delivered to everyone but can it be made accessible for all deprived
people. This conflict also determines the decision to make social Intervention and hence impact.